Green Weenie Time

The ranks of Green Weenie Award contenders this week is longer than usual, but it looks like some of the greenies of Colorado will come out on top. Turns out that Starbucks, which can’t seem to do anything right these days, has put out a series of coffee mugs that have images depicting aspects of each of the 50 states. But woe unto their Colorado mug: it includes the images of an oil rig! (See photo at left.) Heavens! Can’t have that!

A Denver TV station reports:

“An oil rig doesn’t represent Colorado. Colorado is colorful; Colorado is scenic. An oil rig represents the dangers to our children’s health; it represents the dangers to our air; it represents the dangers to our landscape,” said Susan Noble, who co-founded North Range Concerned Citizens, which represents Commerce City residents opposed to drilling near neighborhoods.

The outrage has also boiled over on Twitter, where people used the hashtag #oilandgasisnotcolorado to call out Starbucks. . .

Colorado has a lot of oil and natural gas production going on, employing maybe as many as 100,000 people and generating $31 billion in total economic activity. And “danger to our landscape?” Has Susan Noble seen what a giant windmill does to the landscape? Maybe she hasn’t noticed because she’s cocooned in a safe space somewhere.

Since the people upset with the oil rig and are taking to Twitter to complain (which uses electricity), I propose this change: swap out the oil drilling rig for a coal-fired power plant. Last time I checked, Colorado got roughly half of its electricity from coal. That’s one reason why a friend of mine in Colorado who drives a Tesla got himself a custom bumper sticker: “How do you like my coal-powered car?”

But not to worry. The left’s new It Girl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is going to save us from climate change! In fact she’s going to save the entire planet. The New Republic—a former magazine—tells us so:

Leftists have been practically leaping for joy since 28-year-old self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary election for Congress last week, an outcome that CNN called “the most shocking upset of a rollicking political season.” But perhaps no group has been more excited than environmentalists. In a political environment where even her fellow Democrats often stay vague on climate change, Ocasio-Cortez has been specific and blunt in talking about the global warming crisis. She also has a plan to fight that crisis—one to transition the United States to a 100-percent renewable energy system by 2035.

To achieve this ambitious goal,she has proposed implementing what she calls a “Green New Deal,” a Franklin Delano Roosevelt–like plan to spur “the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs,” according to her official website. “The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” she told HuffPost last week. “We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.”

These positions have earned Ocasio-Cortez significant positive press.

Wait—what happened to the energy-climate “Apollo Project”? That was the grand analogy a decade ago. There was even an “Apollo Alliance” formed to promote the idea. Now we’re back to new New Deals and super-Marshall Plans?

Of course, if she has any success at all, what we’ll end up with is the energy equivalent of Obamacare.

Incidentally, there is this peculiar passage in the article a little further down:

How the Green New Deal would be paid for was a common point of contention—after all, Roosevelt’s New Deal was paid for by massive cuts in government spending, tax hikes, and decreased pay for government workers.

Look, I know the New Republic is barely a shadow of its once proud self, but this is embarrassing.